


Phantom Limb

by pretzel_logic



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, The black ice is more pitch wanting a friend, and not handling rejection well, head canon, movie!verse, pitch is really obsessive in this story, references to DWA comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-21
Updated: 2014-04-21
Packaged: 2018-01-20 05:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1498585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pretzel_logic/pseuds/pretzel_logic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happened suddenly and with a sickening crack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Phantom Limb

**Author's Note:**

> so in the Pitch Black comic DWA released Pitch had a staff 600 years ago and by movie time he didn't. My thoughts on that.
> 
> Also, holy crap people. I meant to put this on here ages ago.

It happened suddenly and with a sickening crack.

Pitch screamed as if his heart had been ripped out of his chest. It probably would have hurt less. His vision blurred and his limbs spasmed as his body and brain tried to comprehend the unexpected pain and overwhelming sense of loss. The world felt hollow and dead and so _empty_ ; the closest comparison Pitch could draw was the great flood when there had been so few surviving humans and even that paled to this deafening. 

Pitch called to the shadows, wanted them to cover him, shield his weakness from the too prying eyes of the Guardians until he could make sense of whatever they had done to him. 

But the shadows weren't obeying.

A sense of betrayal and anger (and yes, fear) flooded Pitch and he _commanded_ the shadows to obey his call. He lifted his staff to better direct the shadows-

His staff.

Pitch stared at the shattered end uncomprehending. Dazedly he looked around and saw the other shorter half of his staff yards away from him. Slowly, clumsily, Pitch thought his movements resembled a drunkard, he stood and started to move toward the missing half of his staff.

That's when he finally realized the Guardians were too quiet. Where were they? They had just been fighting moments before. 

"-finish him off," growled the newest Guardian, a giant humanoid rabbit.

"No! Is not right Bunny. Killing Pitch will solve nothing," North argued.

A rabbit named Bunny? Pitch would have been laughing by now if he didn't feel so disoriented. 

"It will _solve_ him being a problem!" argued Bunny looking away from North to glare venomously at Pitch.

The fear spirit was starting to suspect no matter what the others said the rabbit was determined to end him. So Pitch fled, stumbling through a shadow into a nearby house and then slipping under the welcoming shade of a child's bed to his home.

He tripped on the first step and crashed down hard onto one of his many staircases. He laid there and wept at his brokenness. His lair felt so soulless with his staff destroyed and his connection to the world's darkness gone. Pitch had lost a companion he had not even realised he had. The shadows were quiet, no hair-raising laughter or creeping footsteps. The cages hung silently, no shrieks of children fear echoing out from them.

Pitch never felt so weak and powerless before in his long long life.

It was frightening.

He laughed then but there was little humor in it. Him! The Fear Spirit, ruler of the Dark Age, afraid! Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

Pitch did not get up, he did not get up for a long time.

~*~

It took time years and decades and centuries before Pitch got used to his lack of power and almost complete destruction of humanity's belief in him. He hated it. He did not want to be used to being _weak_ , to be being pathetic. Pitch wanted to be _complete_ , he wanted the shadows to be alive, dancing to his tune and whispering to him the fears of the world. He wanted what was rightfully his _back_.

Worse of all though, Pitch hated how sometimes he forgot he was a cripple. 

Sometimes he would leave his lair with no thought of the sunlight hurting him because he had the shadows to protect him. Except he didn't and oh how he _burned_ for that mistake.

Other times he would be wandering around a human settlement and be drawn up short when he did not feel the familiar weight of the staff in his hand thumping against the ground as he walked. Or he would think his staff was too short even though it was no longer _there_. 

Though the worst was when Pitch would move to gesture dramatically with his staff or to use it as a weapon and suddenly been drawn short at the sudden realisation it was _gone_.

Pitch learned to adapt. His hands, and by extension his body, became more expressive to make up for the aching loss. Nothing made up for the his missing powers, missing companionship.

Not until he discovered he could corrupt dreamsand.

Pitch couldn't remember feeling so excited. Could North sense his wonder? Bunny his hope? No, he doubted it. His feelings were probably a drop in an ocean of belief for them. He _hated_ the Guardians, the rabbit most of all for breaking him. Pitch wanted them to pay, to _suffer_ like they made him suffer and Sandy's sand was the beginning of a beautiful revenge.

After all, what was a speck of sand here or there in a desert?

~*~

It takes more time, more years and even decades, to start creating shapes with his nightmare sand. He's rather found of making scythes but has learned to make arrows and swords and other weapons. All the better to one day kill the Guardians with (but not before they suffer. Oh no, he would not be that kind, that merciful).

Then, quite by accident he made a Nightmare. It was a creature of terrifying beauty and it almost, _almost_ , made up for the loss of the shadows. But not quite. The Nightmares, for all their ravenous hunger for fear, weren't _his_. They weren't Sanderson's either, not anymore, but they weren't Pitch's. The Nightmares would never replace his shadows (now so silent and _dead_ ) but they were a balm to the gaping wound his broken staff left behind.

It was enough, it would have to be.

~*~

Then Jack uses his staff. The young spirit calls upon the powers of ice and wind far beyond any spirit has the right to _with no believers_. Pitch can't help but laugh. He had thought Jack was something _new_ , a spirit made by the Moon rather then the world, but Jack was in fact something _old_ , like him.

Jack used a staff. Jack was like him. Pitch had to have the spirit. Together they would destroy the Guardians and rule the world as they were meant to, as spirits once did in days long past. Together they would not remake the Dark Age but the Golden one. With Jack ruling by his side Pitch could almost pretend he wasn't incomplete.

~*~

Except Jack didn't think they're alike, didn't want to be alike, didn't want anything to do with him. 

Very Well.

It's so so easy to get Jack's staff once he threatened the welfare of one of Tooth's precious fairies. Pitch thought to break the staff, leave Jack alone and weak and broken (not so different now Jack) but the familiar weight in his hand gave him pause.

He had tried to replace his staff in the past, Pitch tried everything. Except... none of those staves belonged to another spirit. None were imbued with the magic and nature of a spirit (a sense of breathlessness from equal parts joy and chill fills him with Jack's staff in hand). 

Its worth a shot. Pitch hardly paid Jack, so anxious of 'Baby Tooth's welfare, as he used the shadows to return to his lair. With Jack out of the way he really should finish off the Guardians. Track down the remaining believers (such a precious few now) and end his troublesome enemies once and for all. 

The hope of being whole once more was by far too seductive to ignore. Pitch hardly heard the cacophony the fairies made when they saw Jack's staff, demanding to know the boy-spirit's welfare. The whole world seemed to fade away as Pitch focused on the staff.

He tried to turn the staff away from fun and cold, towards darkness and fear. Tried to remember what it was like for the darkness of the world to be _alive_ and imbued the sensation into the staff.

Nothing. Jack's staff remained useless in his hands.

So Pitch tried to at least use Jack's staff as the other spirit did. tried to call upon ice and snow and joy but, nothing. 

Jack's staff was as useless to Pitch as all his previous attempts to replace his original.

Defeat and despair tasted bitter on his tongue. He was broken. There was no way to fix what he lost. Red filled Pitch's vision and with a furious roar he threw Jack's staff at the cages that held the tooth fairies.

The fairies settled down into a startled silence (they weren't _quite_ afraid, not yet) and stared owlishly at Pitch. The Nightmare King felt his chest heaving but from rage or grief he could not tell. Nightmare sand twisted around his hands, as erratic as his emotions and Pitch couldn't _stand_ it anymore. Could not bear to look at, never mind use, the pathetic facsimile of his shadows. 

With another scream of rage, Pitch sent all the nightmare sand above to the surface. Just wanting to be left _alone_ (are you sure we're so different Jack?), Pitch sent all the fairies and the teeth out of his lair as well. 

Feeling beyond exhausted, Pitch curled up in his hollow globe and slept. Revenge, restoring the Dark Age, _Jack_ ; nothing was going to bring back his powers so Pitch simply... stopped caring. Let the Guardians have it all. He did not care, not anymore.

(except sleep was hard to come by. He felt his- he felt the nightmare sand being restored to dreamsand. Felt the return of Sanderson. Watched apathetically as his globe, slowly at first but then rapidly, lit up his lair with its soft light. _He did not care_.)

**Author's Note:**

> I actually have some more written for this with a bigger black ice emphasis but I felt it didn't go with this first part (and it's incomplete). I may post the rest later but no promises.


End file.
